Why global temperatures held steady for 10 years

EVEN a cloud of pollution has a silver lining. Global warming temporarily ground to a halt over the last 10 years because of increased pollution from countries like China, coupled with trends in the El Niño system.

Although we keep on pumping huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, between 1998 and 2008 global temperatures held steady.

To try to explain why, Robert Kaufmann at Boston University and colleagues took data collected between 1998 and 2008 on several factors that can affect the climate, including greenhouse gas emissions, sulphur pollution from burning coal, levels of incoming radiation from the sun, and the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) - a cyclical change in the behaviour of the Pacific Ocean.

When they plugged the information into a statistical model, they found that it predicted steady global temperatures ...

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